Homeland Recap, Season Three Premiere: Is Saul the (New) Mole?

Remember the scene in Skyfall when Judi Dench’s M scolds a group of preening politicians by informing them in no uncertain terms that the kingdom is menaced by invisible enemies—and can be protected only by equally invisible defenders? And then her words are proved horribly true when Javier Bardem, his henchmen, and his amazing hairdo bust into the room and start blasting away at everything in sight?

Well, it’s safe to assume that the writers of Homeland remember it. But in their version, Claire Danes’s Carrie doesn’t get to eloquently state her case, and she certainly doesn’t have it validated by an influx of cooperative terrorists. Because this is a show that revels in intelligence-agency office politics—which are notoriously vicious, since everyone involved is a trained liar and killer—Carrie finds herself, just 58 days after Abu Nazir’s traumatizing attack on the C.I.A., twisting in the wind and perilously close to being chucked under a speeding Greyhound.

So much for the idea that, with David Estes out of the way, Carrie would be valued for her uncanny ability to know what’s going to happen before it does. Instead, Congress is throwing her worst fears—she missed an attack and people died!—in her face. By the end of the episode, the big questions were: 1) How much humiliation will Carrie have to endure before being proved right yet again? 2) How much guff will we have to take from this Senator Lockhart douchebag (whoa, that’s Tracy Letts!) before we get to see him ritually humiliated? And 3) What the hell happened to Saul’s moral compass?

I’m not that mad at Saul for saying what he did before the Senate committee. If jumping up and down really hard on Carrie is what it takes to save the agency—which, we are told again and again in this episode, is at risk of being put out of business—then maybe that’s a price worth paying. (Judi Dench, one suspects, would approve.) And it’s not as if Carrie’s name has been shared publicly—yet. Still, most of us look to Saul for fatherly wisdom and kindness, not Machiavellian realpolitik. And it’s tempting to think that all of this could have been avoided if Mira had just given him some sugar the night before instead of retreating to her separate bedroom. (Seriously, guys? In 2013?) Saul is doing anything he can to show that he is a decisive alpha male brimming with testosterone, not a dithering bureaucrat promoted beyond his level of competence after literally every other candidate was blown to smithereens by the guy he was supposed to be keeping tabs on.

To prove something similar to the president and Senator Lockhart, Saul signs off on a six-pronged assassination, the ethical legitimacy of which falls somewhere between Abu Ghraib and the My Lai Massacre. He knows it’s a terrible thing to do—“We’re not assassins, Mira, we’re spies!”—but he pushes through anyway, desperate for a “big honking win” that will shore up the agency’s credibility on Capitol Hill. Luckily for him, the attack is a success, even if Quinn has to kill a child to pull it off. It will be interesting to see how Homeland addresses that little wrinkle. Over on Breaking Bad (R.I.P.!), the collateral murder of an innocent kid proved to be the acid that chewed away the foundations of Walter White’s meth empire—and let’s not forget what the death of Abu Nazir’s son Issa did to Nicholas Brody. But so far, all we’ve heard is Saul describing the operation as flawlessly executed. If Saul is taking credit for the attack on the floor of the Senate, surely the news that America’s assassins took out a little boy won’t take long to leak. And it’s natural to suppose that Quinn, who elected not to kill Brody as a matter of conscience, will have a hard time reconciling this with his self-proclaimed identity as the guy who kills bad guys.

Speaking of leaks, it seems we’ve got a new mole this season. Except instead of passing secrets to the terrorists, this one’s doing something worse: informing the American public about the crimes committed in its name and on its behalf. It’s obvious from the way Lockhart and the press are treated in this episode that we’re supposed to find this appalling, and naturally we all love Carrie and don’t want anyone to know that she was schtupping the world’s most-wanted terrorist (even though he’s innocent, we just know it!). Still—was I the only one left wondering if we were really being asked to root for the perjurers over the leakers?

A few days before the season premiere, Claire Danes warned us that we’d find Carrie “back on the “crazy sauce,” and she wasn’t kidding. She’s off her meds, filling notebooks with weird charts, decorating the walls with spooky murals, buying booze in bulk, banging guys who look vaguely like Brody, and interrupting Saul’s meal with his new black-ops bros to register her displeasure at being fed like a piece of meat to the Third Estate wolf pack. Frankly, I think the show is more fun when she’s palming her lithium, and I just hope she decides to enlist Virgil in a cockamamie scheme to figure out who’s been spilling her secrets to the Senate.

With any luck, the writers will find a way to bring her back together with Dana, too. These two have so much in common—and so much to learn from one another. Carrie can teach Dana how to self-medicate at the Bottle King, and Dana can teach Carrie how to use Snapchat!

I didn’t mind the Dana stuff in this episode, though I’m not sure the extended single-shot scene in her bedroom was as cinematic as the show runners may have intended. (I’d also like to point out, as the proud owner of a Samsung G4, that it doesn’t make that iPhone “whoosh” sound when you send a message.) Dana’s emo boyfriend seems like a tool, but I’m glad to see her getting some action—anything to distract her from the fact that, among the 219 Americans her dad stands accused of killing, one was her last boyfriend.

The drama between Jess and her mother landed with a thud, in my living room at least, and I couldn’t even tell what we were supposed to believe Dana was thinking when she overheard that conversation about whether or not she intended to kill herself when she slit her wrists. Surely she can’t be upset with these two for worrying about her. Maybe she’s realizing just how much pain she caused? Whatever the answer, I was supremely gratified to see the way Dana handled the remodeling of the bathroom: “It looks nice.” There’s hope for this kid yet!

Overall, this was a solid episode—more in line with the show’s excellent first season than its soapy, sloppy second season. A lot happened in this hour, but it didn’t feel like the writers were desperately reaching for levers to pull and knobs to twist. I didn’t miss Brody, and I am actually interested in the new mysteries that were set up.

I even came up with a ridiculous Internet conspiracy theory of my own: What if Saul is the one leaking information to Lockhart? The sequence of events put him in the position of being a good soldier, telling the truth to the committee, and that could shore up his credibility with Congress at a time when he needs it to save the agency. And by doling out information on his own terms, he can arguably control what does and doesn’t get revealed about Carrie—leaking just enough to land her in hot water but not enough to boil her entirely. Plus, making Saul the new mole would amount to a fine in-joke between the writers and the many Internet commenters who have long suspected Saul of being the original mole.